Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A six eyed crow lands on the lab table where Maddie is showing her son how to read ghostscript. 

(“It’s something everyone should know!” she’d told him, leaving no room for argument as they marched down to the lab to inspect Fenton Works’ latest find.

“Forget about learning it—if you can prove that I’m going to need to read something a ghost wrote even once in the next fifty years, I’ll eat the book.”

“You think I’d let you eat it after all the trouble we went through to find it?”

“If I let you run tests on what eating a ghost book does to a human, probably.”

It’s a powerful argument, but eventually, the desire to teach her son to read a second time—“You were so cute the first time, I bet it’ll be even cuter if we do it again!” “Mom, what?”—wins out over how interesting the results of Danny’s experiment might be.)

The crow lets out an echoing caw and tilts its head. Green, pupilless eyes stare unblinkingly at the space between them. It hops forward. 

In a second, Maddie’s out of her seat, book abandoned in front of them as she pulls Danny behind her. Her gun is cocked and aimed before her chair hits the floor.

“Danny, go get your father!” she hisses, pushing at his shoulder. 

“Mom, I don’t think—”

The ghost crow hops forward with another caw and opens its razor sharp beak—right over the page they were practicing on. The crow lowers its head like it’s bracing itself to spring forward and bore a hole right into her throat—

“Oh no you don’t—”

Maddie knocks the safety off and steadies her hands—

Too late. The bird lets out a deep, throaty wretch—but it doesn’t leap forward like she was planning it to. Instead, it hops forward again and hacks straight onto the book. 

Nothing comes out; Maddie nearly shoots it into Oblivoid anyway (no, not oblivion, and not void, either; ask her about her theories on where ghosts go when they die sometime; it’s actually very interesting, even if her children don’t think so). The only thing that stops her is that it’s perched right on the edge of the book's very many pages, and she really doesn’t want to lose their first glimpse into ghost culture before anyone really gets a good look. While the book may be salvageable with ectovomit on it, she very much doubts it would consent to unburning itself should her shot pull a little too South.

For now, the bird survives. 

The bird immediately challenges Maddie’s begrudging acceptance of its existence by sounding like it’s about to cough itself to second death.

“Mom, maybe we should help…” Maddie startles at the voice in her ear; what was Danny still doing here? She grabs at his hand and pulls him completely behind her, using her own body for cover in case the crow decides to explode and contaminate the lab. She’s wearing her hazmat suit, but Danny isn’t. 

“Danny, go get your father, now!” she says, turning her head ever so slightly to look at him without fully taking eyes off the crow. He looks between her and the bird, his expression so tight with fear it makes something in her chest pull tight with grief—her poor baby is afraid for her, he doesn’t want to leave her alone, but he doesn’t know how to defend them, either. “I can handle this, Danny; I’ve fought ghosts a hundred times its size!”

The crow lets out another uncomfortable hack, its beak stretching painfully open as it does, and with a wet cough, throws up a scroll that finds a home on the crease of the book where pages meet spine. The crow spends a moment preening, laying its ruffled feathers flat before righting itself again. It looks at her expectantly, then at the scroll.

“...I don’t think we should touch that,” Danny says, breaking the pregnant silence in the lab as Maddie stares down the crow like it’ll be going for her eyes, next. 

“How else will we know what it wants?” she asks. More like how else will she get it away from the book and into the sights of her gun, but she doesn’t know if it’s intelligent or not and refuses to give the game away in case it is.

“Uh, maybe try asking it?”

“Danny, it’s a bird—”

“A ghost bird, and ghosts can talk, you told me that!” he argues. Maddie bites back a curse; why is he choosing now to argue with her? 

“I also told you—”

Maddie’s about to retort (and probably ground him if he decides to keep fighting her on this), but the bird hops in place and catches her waning attention fully. 

“If you’re quite done, Mother,” the bird says, surprising both of them. It turns its head slightly, looking at her at an angle. “Your assistance has been requested by the Ghost King’s court.”

With zero hesitation, Maddie aims high and pulls the trigger.

Somehow, the crow gets away.

“I thought the ghosts didn’t have a king anymore!” Jack says, flipping through their ghostscript dictionary. If she’s being honest, ‘dictionary’ might be too strong a word: it implies they’ve got pages and pages of material to sort through, when in reality, they’ve got a scant few of the ghosts' symbols deciphered out of the tens of thousands they know exist. “Now we hear they’ve got a whole royal hierarchy. Crazy stuff, huh Mads?”

They’ve been staring at the scroll the crow left behind for hours now, trying to make some sense of it. Luckily, her gambit with the crow hadn’t hit the book, so they’re cross-referencing it with their poor man’s dictionary to squeeze some kind of meaning from the missive they've received.

From what they can gather, it’s some kind of consultation request (“help”, “urgent”, and “expertise” are the only three words they can parse in the first paragraph) about the ghost zone. Some “force” (and the choice of this particular symbol is strange, because from what little they know, there are several more direct ways to say “enemy”) is threatening “harm” (again, a strange symbol choice, and Maddie’s beginning to wish she had waited until after the crow explained what it wanted to shoot it) and the ghosts can’t stop it by themselves.  

The only thing they know for sure is that the seal that held the scroll together belongs to the King of all Ghosts: a menacing, pointed crown with a heavy ring settled prominently on one of the points was one of the first glyphs she and Jack had deciphered. It’s highly recognizable; between the invasion just a few months ago and the placement of it on the corner of every page of the book they’d found, she’d recognize it anywhere.

For better or for worse, the Ghost King needed their help. Or at the very least, his court did.

“I just can’t believe they’re coming to us,” she says. “Why do they think we can help them? Or that we'd want to?”

Jack laughs. “They probably saw the Fenton ecto-skeleton in action, back when we had it!” he says. “And if they didn’t, all the other spooks we’ve sent packing told them. It’s obvious we know our stuff!”

“Then why do they think we would help them?” Maddie corrects. 

Jack doesn’t have a quick answer this time.

“Maybe they’re desperate?” he wonders. 

Maddie purses her lips and thinks she’d like to know what could possibly be happening in the ghost zone now, for the ghosts to turn to the very people hunting them down for aid.

She peels back the scroll and reveals a new line, and to her absolute surprise, recognizes the symbols instantly. It’s not because she had recently been studying these words or had gotten lucky in her memorization to this point: instead of a line of near-incomprehensible ghostscript, there are human numbers on the scroll.

(Jack and Maddie have learned that ghosts have a strange concept of time. When there was an urgent matter they needed to attend to, they measured time internally based off of the universal rate of ectoplasm absorption into their cores. Anything that was going to take longer than the time it took an average drained core to absorb ectoplasm to satiation was not considered urgent, and ghosts tended not to ascribe any sort of numeric value to how long or how far out non-urgent matters would be. Not very efficient, but what need does an immortal body have to keep careful track of the one resource it has in complete and utter abundance? To beings that had all the time in the world, what was the point to rush matters unless there was no other choice?)

“Maybe they are desperate,” she parrots back. “Jack, they’ll be coming here in three days.”

She passes him the scroll, and Jack stares down at the date in question.

“Ghosts don’t use a human calendar,” he reminds them both.

“Looks like they’re making an exception,” she tells him. 

Three days—nearly twice as long as it took the average core to fill to satiation—implied that the matter wasn’t urgent, but the fact that human numbers were included at all gave her pause. Three days was time for them to prepare; it was a diplomatic amount of time, maybe the minimum amount of time they could offer without being rude. 

“We could do a lot of prep in three days,” Jack finally says, putting down the scroll. He looks at her, eyes inviting her opinion, words more a question or offer than an argument. “Heck, I bet we could take down every last one of them that came through, with three days.”

Maddie stares at the scroll, its curling page looser from the stress of being pulled open for so long. On the corner of this page, just like the book, is the Ghost King’s symbol, stamped neatly in lieu of a signature. From what they’d learned in the aftermath, Pariah Dark had been the old king, and he’d been dethroned. Just who were they dealing with now?

She thinks about what could have made them reach out to ghost hunters. She thinks about desperation and satiation. She thinks about the date scrawled across the scroll in human terms and how unnatural it would feel for a ghost to break the urgent down to un-urgent terms. She thinks about diplomacy, and how much they could learn about this new idea, that ghosts could have a culture outside of the violence they expressed on earth.

“Mom, maybe we should help…" Danny’s voice rings in her ears. 

Well…she’s a scientist before she’s a hunter. Ecto-anthropologist could rank somewhere between the two, for the time being. And worst case scenario, she'd show the ghosts just how quickly hunter could move up in rank, should they try anything with her.

“I’d like to hear what they have to say,” she says. “Jack, if they’re reaching out…it might be big. This could change everything!”

Jack’s face splits into a wide, excited smile.

“I was hoping you’d say that, Mads,” he tells her. “Let’s tell the kids we’re gonna have company!”

The kids don’t take well to learning that they’re gonna have company.

Jazz is very vocal about how inviting random ghosts into the house is a horrible idea, guys, what are you thinking? She gets frustrated when she thinks they aren’t listening to her and huffs all the way to her room, commenting loudly about how it won’t be her fault if one of them gets kidnapped by ghosts. She doesn’t let her door slam, though. Jazz doesn’t let doors slam in the house unless she’s too upset to notice, and Maddie’s been using it for years as a way to judge her daughter’s mental state. She’s upset now, but Maddie thinks her daughter will come around. At the very least, she sees a logic in what her parents are doing, even if she doesn't agree.

(Maddie only wishes Danny had a similar tick. He lets doors slam more often than not; he’s a lot more forgetful than his sister, so the only thing Maddie knows is that when Danny lets a door slam, she probably shouldn’t look into it too deeply. On the plus side, it’s so regular that she pretty much always knows when he’s home by sound alone.)

Danny’s a lot quieter after Jazz leaves, but Maddie can see that silent fear of his is back, if it ever unrooted itself after the crow. Her sweet baby boy—this year has been rough on him (she sees the dark circles under his eyes, the way he’s gotten so flighty at every odd noise and unexpected sight) and she thinks that after this, they’ll spend some time away from Amity. The school year is almost over, anyway; pulling them out a bit early won’t hurt much, and she thinks they could use a break.

“After you help us get ready, you’re more than welcome to stay with Sam or Tucker, if you’d rather be out of the house,” she tells Danny. He shoots her a tired smile—she worries that he isn’t sleeping enough, but isn’t quite sure how to bring it up for a sixth time without both of them losing their patience. 

“It’ll be weird,” he says, “but what if something happens and I’m not there to help? I dunno if I could live with myself…”

Maddie sits down next to him and pulls him into her arms. “Your father and I are experts; we know what we’re doing,” she tells him firmly. “We’ll figure out what the ghosts want, and if it’s reasonable, we’ll help out, just this once. Nothing’s going to happen, but even if it did, it’s not your fault. We’re the adults here, Danny. Your only responsibility is to make sure that you feel safe, okay?”

He tightens his grip around her waist.

“I’m gonna stay,” he tells her. She ignores the rapid fire of his heartbeat against her chest.

“I’m proud of you,” she says. “And if you change your mind, I’ll still be proud.”

She means it.

Three days pass in a blur of activity.

They clean the house. Maddie insists on it, even if she isn’t sure that it’s necessary. Would the dead really care if there was dust on the floor? She doesn’t want to find out, so she assigns tasks. Jack’s fully engaged in turning the lab for some kind of meeting space complete with multiple rooms in case group work is an option, and she splits her time between helping him and helping the kids. She knows she and Jack are asking for a lot from them, but grumbling and dark looks aside, they help, and she’s thankful.

Three days isn’t a lot of time, but it’s enough to start reaching out to the connections they have in the industry. The name Fenton carries a lot of weight in the world of ectobiology, but the community is small and its reach limited to the few other contributors to the literature that exist in the country. 

Four of their peers say that they’ll sit in. Drs. Alice Nguyen, Alex Rivera, and Thomas and Cassandra Campbell begin heading to Amity Park, and the Fentons spend the second morning preparing to receive even more guests. 

Because she’s curious, she asks Jack about Vlad.

“Couldn’t get a hold of him,” Jack says, disappointment clear on his face. “Guess he’s busy.”

Maddie keeps her thoughts on it to herself, but she can’t help but wonder if Vlad would have picked up the phone if she had been on the other end.

The day it’s supposed to happen is organized chaos in Fenton Works. The kids go to school and the house is clean and quiet for about ten minutes. Then, their human guests start arriving, lugging behind them all sorts of testing devices and equipment.

The scientists start setting up in the living room; about a half hour later, they run out of space and start again in the dining room. 

This happens two more times, until finally, the first floor is filled to capacity with every iteration of ghost-related technology that had come out within the last fifteen years. Maddie’s in awe of it; she hasn’t seen anything the Campbells have worked on in at least five years, and they’ve made some impressive progress in a number of fields. She has never met Dr. Rivera in person, and their work in ecto-biomechanical engineering is groundbreaking. The tour the doctor gives her of their latest ideas is nothing short of spectacular. Alice is a friend from college, and they’ve kept in touch consistently over the years. She’s the only one to ask about the kids, and they spend longer than they probably should catching up.

She lets the other doctors know that the ghosts weren’t specific about when they were coming, but Jack will set off an alarm when they arrive. She gives a brief introduction to the idea that ghosts have cultures within the ghost zone and requests that they not ask direct questions to any of them concerning how they live. An anthropologist’s job in this situation is to observe and notate behaviors, and direct questions might change behaviors and teach them nothing. Her peers agree, of course; they work more theoretically than the Fentons do and while they believe in ghosts, they’ve never expressed any interest in ripping them apart to see how they work. Sticking to observation won't be a problem for any of them.

“A cultural perspective could do wonders for advancing the whole body of research,” Alice says with a wide smile. “It’s certainly going to help my meta-analysis on ecto-psychology and the facilitation of interactions between living and nonliving beings. Maddie, you and Jack should co-author it with me!”

Maddie’s interested in the idea (knowing a ghost’s psychological predilections would definitely be useful in subduing them) and tells her they’ll have to sit down and talk about it in detail after all of this blows over.

The door slams, and Maddie turns to see Danny following Jazz through the door and up the stairs. They wave when she makes eye contact and head up to change. Maddie takes a moment to remind her peers that their nonliving guests might prefer to meet in the dead of night, when they seem to be most active in Amity. 

About ten seconds later, the alarm goes off.

“Or at five past four!” Thomas Campbell says cheerily. “That works, too!”

The lights flicker momentarily above them as the ghost shield goes on; if any ghosts intend on causing trouble, their impact won’t be felt by anyone outside of the home. Maddie checks and double checks the systems and finds that they’re in perfect working order.

The kids come down the stairs; they know this alarm isn’t for emergencies, so there’s no panic in their footfall as they descend. Jazz looks unimpressed with the whole display in the living room; Danny’s face pinches like the equipment might reach out and try to grab him.

It certainly doesn’t help that as he passes the first sensor, everything in the room lights up and starts wailing.

“AH!” Danny cries and steps back—but the sensors don’t turn off. The scientists are on them immediately, checking the equipment and taking notes.

“At least ten spectral entities in the house!” Rivera cries out, voice ringing with excitement. “Ten, and I’ve never even seen one!”

“We’ve got to get down there!” Cassandra Campbell declares. “Tommy, let’s go!”

“Observation and notation!” Maddie feels like she needs to remind them as they scramble down to the basement. They’re gone before she can finish the sentence. Even though the sigh is exasperated when it leaves her lips, she can’t help but smile and turn to her kids.

Jazz and Danny have both gone pale at the edge of the living room. She gestures for them to follow her, and hesitantly, they do. Jazz’s jaw is locked as she looks between Maddie and her brother.

“I want a gun,” she declares.

Maddie frowns. “Really?” she can’t help but ask. “You told me—”

“Nothing lethal, obviously!” Jazz amends. “Like…one that shoots…nets, or something? In case I have to stop a bunch of them at once?”

“A Fenton Net Gun?” she says aloud, remembering that there’s one stashed in one of the kitchen cupboards. 

“If that’s what you decided to call it, I guess?” Jazz says, looking flustered at the whole idea. “I just don’t wanna feel helpless if things go wrong!”

Maddie, who had been right on the edge of teasing her daughter, decides to drop it. 

“It’s next to the nice plate set, honey,” she says, and Jazz starts navigating the maze of ghost tech towards the kitchen. “And you, Danny? Do you want something too? I could get that whip your father’s been working on—one touch from a ghost and it goes off like lightning!”

She hears the door to the lab open and slam shut. Danny startles at both noises.

“Ah, no thanks!” Danny says quickly. Then, almost shyly, “could I just…stick with you?”

Her brave boy. Maddie’s heart soars as she says, “of course you can, sweetie.”

She raises her hand up in invitation, and he crosses the room and takes it. 

She can hear Jack talking before they’re in the new wing of the lab. He sounds about as relaxed as a ghost hunter inviting ghosts into his home could be, but she picks up the pace, pulling Danny gently along behind her. He follows easily and stays close, mumbling something under his breath that she doesn’t catch. She feels him shiver ever so slightly in her hand and looks back at him with an encouraging smile. He looks up and meets her eyes, smiling wearily. 

“Like glue, okay Danny?” she asks him, and he nods. “And if you don’t want to be there, you don’t have to be.”

“Okay, mom,” he agrees. Together, they round the last corner and set their sights on what can only be described as the delegation.

She recognizes some of them; others are absolutely foreign (it might even be their first time on Earth!). She doesn’t know many of their names, but she thinks that will change depending on what they want. Jack sees her and motions for the small crowd of humans to part as she approaches, her youngest pressed against her side, so close she can only see the top of his hair when she looks down.

“And my wife and son!” Jack announces, gesturing grandly. “Maddie and Danny Fenton. Mads, you won’t believe what’s going on, they’re talking about—”

Jack’s words peter off as one of the larger ghosts steps forward; in place of hair are green flames, and his eyes glow an eerie green as he regards them. Danny is shaking slightly in her grip, and she squeezes his shoulder lightly as she meets eyes with the ghost. 

She’s never been this close to a ghost she wasn’t trying to hurt, and it’s a strange feeling. Part of her wants nothing more than to draw and fire, but the fact that they’re in this situation—that the ghosts made a request, that they put it in writing, that they sent diplomats—it keeps her from reaching for a weapon, at least for the time being.

There’s a chance that this is some kind of plot. That the ghosts want nothing more than to infiltrate Fenton Works or find a way to cripple Amity Park’s ghost hunters. 

But there’s also a chance that they’re genuinely asking for help.

She may be a ghost hunter, but first and foremost, Maddie is a scientist. On top of that, she’s curious, and that alone is enough to keep suspicion out of her voice when she says,

“Your letter made it sound like you were asking for help.”

The ghost with flaming green hair looks between her and Danny for a moment, like he’s confused that a mother might bring her son to a formal meeting of worlds. Danny feels like he’s vibrating against her side, and she buries a hand in the black mop of hair pressed to her clavicle. He might be scared, but she’ll protect him no matter what. She fixes her face into a no-nonsense look and turns her eyes back to the ghost, who looks equal parts confused and weary. 

“We do need help,” the ghost says firmly. Every so often, he’ll glance at Danny, like he can’t believe her son is here, but just as quickly he’ll return his attention to her. “We don’t know who else to turn to.”

Muttering breaks out behind her; the scientists are furiously taking notes and swapping theories. She glances to her right; Jack and Jazz are standing together, whispering furiously. Jack looks confused, and Maddie can’t see Jazz’s expression at all. 

Another ghost steps forward; Maddie would have to live under a rock to have missed that her name is Ember. She made sure everyone in Amity Park knew it before she disappeared.

Her eyes linger longer on Danny. She can hear his jaw click from how tight he’s clenching it, and she thinks she’ll encourage him to stay back next time. He’s trying to put on a brave face, she knows it, but it’s not worth the pain it’s causing him. 

Finally, the ghost plants herself next to her comrade. Shoulders back, head held high, she meets the eyes of every human in the room.

“The ghost zone is destabilizing,” Ember says. “Our home is tearing itself apart.”

A horrible silence falls over the room.

The ghosts have demands.

She doesn’t know why they have demands when they’re the ones asking for help, but Maddie and Jack, as the de facto leaders of the group by means of it being their house this is happening in, agree to listen. Jack is currently going over logistics with the first ghost they met—Skulker, as he’d been introduced after the fact. Maddie’s taken over the more intricate work: she’s the lead negotiator, and opening talks have started. She’s about to lay the groundwork for how all of their future interactions will go. 

The thing that makes this a bit easier is that she’s holding all the cards. She almost feels bad for the ghost dressed in all white who holds the door open for her and lets her pass into the small meeting room they’ve sequestered off for private conferences. He’s not going to know what hit him. Her aim is to draw out as many concessions from him as possible in return for help: the ability to study them, access to their books and any significant cultural landmarks, agreement to interviews and anything else she thinks she can wring out of them—as far as Maddie is concerned, everything is on the table, if they need human expertise to solve their problems. They can't expect help for free, after all.

She sits in front of him. He introduces himself as Walker and gives her a nod, but skips any further pleasantries after she returns the gestures.

“We know you’re hunters,” the ghost says, “and if we’re going to work together, there’s going to be rules.”

Maddie feels her lips press together at the gall. She reminds herself that she’s studied the ghost zone; he can’t possibly know what she knows, because it took years of scientific research to draw the conclusions they did about how their worlds interacted with each other.

“There’s going to be negotiations,” she corrects him sharply. “Especially if you want our help to fix the ghost zone.”

Walker leans back in his seat.

“Slip of the tongue,” he says. His mouth moves ever so slightly when he speaks, and she can’t get a good read on his sincerity. “You’ll have to forgive me; it’s been a long time since I’ve sat at a table like this. I suppose we’re both learning the ropes, hm?”

Oh, he’s trying to be cute. Maddie suppresses an eye roll in the name of the bigger picture.

“Of course,” she says. “I can’t imagine it’s easy, especially with what’s at stake.”

“And there is a lot at stake,” he agrees. “But I think we need to set some things straight, first.”

“Oh?”

Walker leans back even further and kicks his heavy boots on the corner of the table. It’s a behavior she’d never accept from her own family, but the ghost looks perfectly at home treating her furniture like a footstool. She wonders where on earth he gets his confidence from and has half a mind to ask if he kept the receipts, because it’s a tacky look on him.

“We need help, that I can’t deny,” he says, steepling his fingers as he speaks. “But I can guarantee that altruism won’t be the only motivating factor in this deal.”

Maddie considers him carefully.

“You don’t have anything we want,” she lies outright. “From where I’m sitting, our goodwill is the only thing you can rely on.”

Walker weighs her words.

“Not as such,” he says. “You don’t seem to be aware of how things work around here.”

“Let me remind you that you came to us,” Maddie cuts in. “We’re very comfortable being enemies. Don’t push us back into old habits because of some misplaced sense of pride.”

In frank disbelief, Maddie watches as the ghost tips his head back and pulls out an old fashioned cigar from his inner jacket pocket. He clenches the cap between his teeth and looks at her appraisingly.

“You got a light?” he asks.

“Don’t smoke in my lab,” Maddie growls, crossing her arms.

“Guess not,” he decides. He tilts his head back and flicks his thumb up like he was striking a match against his index finger. A thin green flame sprouts from the very tip of his thumb, and once he holds it under the foot, takes a long drag. He holds it for a moment before puffing up a thick ring of pale purple smoke into the air above them.

“Pride,” Walker muses. “You really think pride is why we’re here?”

“Why don’t you get to the point?” Maddie asks, feeling frustration slowly claw its way into her chest. She had expected some kind of leveling with her at the very least, if not outright begging. This ghost knows she isn’t reasonable where his kind are concerned; he should be bending over backwards to keep her listening to him!

All he does is puff his cigar and stare at the ceiling. Another drag, another purple ring. 

“You think you’re going to be doing us a favor,” he finally says. “That we should be grovelling and rolling over for you. Truth is, we don’t have to go through that tired little song and dance.”

“And why’s that?” she feints, feeling the beginnings of disbelief start to rise. Maddie is a scientist who studies the ghost zone for a living, and these ghosts don’t have access to her resources. They’ve never studied Earth, so it follows that only she knows that it’s because—

“Because,” Walker drawls, “our worlds are connected. Mutually parasitic and inseparable, to boot. You forsake us, you forsake yourselves. One hand washes the other, and all that. That’s why we can skip the part where you think you’re better than us. It’s not philanthropy we need from you; it’s the acceptance of our mutually assured destruction that’s the basis for this relationship.”

But she didn’t consider the idea that the ghosts might have known, too. That ghosts could have scientists, or be cognizant enough to know that their home was under attack and that it wouldn’t be the only thing threatened should the situation take a turn for the worst…

“So you’re threatening us,” Maddie deduces pretty easily. If thankfulness won’t be keeping them in line in her home, she’s not sure what will, right now. In this shifting of power, she defaults to what she knows best. “I’m not sure why I expected anything else from a filthy ghost.”

“Filthy?” Walker wonders, a flicker of emotion running through his words. “Rumor on the street is you’re waist deep in a rising pool of ectoplasm and inching closer to flooded every day. Might wanna clean up your own act before you start slinging insults like that, M—”

There’s a knock at the door they’ve closed—Maddie turns around to snarl at whoever it is that she’s busy—

“Hey mom, I—” Danny looks up and sees that she’s not alone. “I, uh—”

Maddie wipes the glare off her face in an instant when she sees her son. Behind her, Walker’s chair slams down on the floor. She looks back at the ghost, who’s now sitting ramrod straight in his chair, looking absolutely shocked to have been interrupted. 

“Apologies,” he says gruffly. “I hadn’t realized we were expecting anyone in particular.”

For the first time, she's broken through his stoic demeanor; he looks like he’s been rebuffed, though for the life of her, she can’t imagine why. 

“Sorry,” Danny says gingerly, taking a careful step back, eyes wavering between her and the ghost across from her. “I just—”

“Later, Danny,” she says, trying to shoo him away with her eyes. “This can’t wait.”

He nods and pulls back; Maddie trusts that he’ll go, and turns back to the real problem. As the door slams shut, Walker winces. He yanks the cigar out of his mouth and hastily snubs it out on the table before it vanishes back into his jacket.

Maddie’s eyebrow raises, but Walker offers no explanation. 

“If we understand what’s at stake,” Walker starts, “I think it’s time to talk about how we’ll be working together to fix it.”

Maddie doesn’t know what spurned it, but if he’s suddenly feeling more cooperative, she’s not going to question the 180 flip his attitude has taken. For now, at least.

“What do you think you need?” she asks. After all, the fate of the world is at stake, and if this ghost suddenly wants to play nice, she can play, too.

“...for starters, a place to set up shop, if we’re going to be here for a while.”

Finally, negotiations begin.

Later, when the ghosts retreat to their newly assigned upper floors of Fenton Works, the humans review the terms of everyone's stay.

“The obvious things, of course,” Maddie tells them, reviewing the consensus she’d agreed on. “No weapons unless for self defense, which we’ve been assured won’t be necessary. Staying out of the rooms they’ve requested, which means no one goes higher than the third floor until they’re gone.”

Some of the scientists huff at not having complete access to the objects of their academic interest, but all go quiet as she continues:

“Mingling is allowed, if both parties consent. The first floor and the lab are considered shared spaces, as are all hallways and public restrooms.”

They go over a few more things. What they’ll talk about and what’s off limits. The nature of the problem, which is that they don’t understand the nature of the problem. And, strangely enough, the timetables they want to follow and refuse to deviate from.

“They don’t want to meet before 4pm,” she tells the group.

“What? Why?” both Campbells say at once.

“I thought this was urgent?” Rivera adds. “Why waste daylight?”

(“Never before that time,” Walker says, eyes narrowing in response to the disbelief on her face. “It’s non-negotiable.”

“I thought this was a doomsday scenario,” Maddie retorts. “You told us your home is destabilizing. It’s immoral for us to waste time when we could be solving the problem. You need to give us a reason.”

Walker’s hand, which rests on the table, slowly squeezes shut, cracking each bleached finger with the movement.

“If it’s non-negotiable,” he says, “the reason doesn’t matter.”

She can’t accept that.

“The entirety of the ghost zone—”

“She’ll hold for as long as we need her to,” the ghost says calmly, like they aren’t talking about the imminent destruction of two worlds. “She always does.”)

Maddie shrugs and raises her hands. On that point, she hadn’t managed to budge him in the slightest. 

“A mystery worth looking into!” Jack declares, which has their peers theory crafting in seconds.

Terms finished, Maddie steps back and leaves them to it. She’s had a busy day, and she’s looking forward to getting some rest before they’re supposed to start saving the world. 

As she turns to leave, she sees Danny’s retreating form slip out of the room. She notices something a bit askew, but not odd enough to dwell on with so many other oddities and threats on her plate: Danny’s shoulders, which have been hunched in on themselves the entire day, are now thrown back in an uncharacteristic display of confidence, considering he’s just learned his parents volunteered their house for an indefinite mass haunting. His hands, which he’d been wringing with self-soothing gestures at the merest hint of a ghost for hours, are clenched into fists. 

When she blinks, he’s turning the corner. A moment later, he disappears from sight. She must imagine that the angle of his foot is off as she watches him go; from the way it raises on his last visible step, the only way his gait makes sense is if he’d walked clear through the wall, first. 

God, she’s really looking forward to getting some sleep. She clearly needs it, if her mind’s starting to play tricks on her.

Chapter Text

The strangest thing about this whole set up is that, unbelievably, it’s the ghosts that try to mingle first.

Maddie comes down to the kitchen the first morning and finds one of them brewing coffee.

She almost pulls a weapon out of habit—the only thing that stops her is that for a moment, with his back turned, he almost looks familiar. The coffee finishes percolating, and the fridge pops open of its own accord in response. Their carton of half-and-half floats out, followed by sugar from the counter and a spoon from a nearby drawer. They all land next to the coffee machine, and the ghost pours sugar and cream into a mug Maddie finally catches sight of near the ghost’s elbow. He pours his coffee last and leaves—to her surprise—a nearly full pot behind. He stirs his drink for a few moments before a soft sigh escapes his lips. It sounds, to her utter disbelief, like satisfaction. 

Everything that floated towards him puts itself away when he’s done: the sugar finds its home on the counter, the half-and-half slides back onto its shelf. 

When he turns and catches sight of her, they’re both caught off guard. He stops, mug in hand. She notes that she’s not holding anything, not even her hands in fists. She should be angry, dismayed, hell, maybe even afraid—

The used spoon clatters to the ground halfway on its trip to the sink.

“You made coffee,” Maddie says. It’s a safe, neutral observation, though not particularly elucidating for either of them.

“I did,” the ghost agrees carefully. “It helps me think.”

He turns quickly, mug still in hand, and hurries towards the spoon. Instead of picking it up telekinetically, he bends down and scoops it up, mindful of his full mug as he moves. 

“Sorry,” he says. “This goes in the sink?”

“Yes, but it’s no problem,” Maddie finds herself saying to this strange, almost docile ghost. “The kids are ten times worse some mornings.”

The ghost lights up.

“Two of them, right?” he asks. “Danny and—oh, I should know this, and—”

“Jazz,” Maddie says. “My oldest.”

The ghost nods to himself, sinking into thought. The spoon floats out of his hand and finishes its trip, clanking lightly against the edge of the sink.

“The oldest!” he says. “Meaning you’re the Mother, correct? Oh, where are my—I’m the Ghost Writer. You didn’t know that, I’d expect. I’m a scribe for the King—I don’t think we’ve met—I record meticulously his important events.”

“More than a mother,” Maddie feels like she has to say. “I’m in charge, too. And—I’m sorry, do you have to keep rhyming?”

Ghostwriter scrambles. “Oh—yes, of course Mo—Maddie,” he corrects. “If it displeases the lady of the house, I’ll try to refrain.”

“Thanks,” Maddie says curtly. She thinks it’s the end of the conversation, but Ghostwriter thinks differently.

“Walker told us about you yesterday,” he says. “He was very specific about how little you wanted us in your living spaces. Oh, and how you thought we didn’t know that both of our homes were in danger. Petty and cruel at one turn, calculating and ruthless at the next! He had a lot to say about you, surprisingly. He’s usually much more taciturn!”

“Oh, did he?” she asks, masking a frown with the question.

She’s not sure why, but she’s a little embarrassed that he knows what happened while she was ironing out details with Walker. She hadn’t been kind—but the point of the meeting hadn’t been to be kind, it had been to see if they could get along, and she would never compromise with a ghost when the safety of her family was involved. If they couldn’t handle humans when they were mad, when they were unfair—she can’t imagine how she’d be able to trust them around her peers, around her children, for any amount of time. To his credit, Walker had been rude, had been condescending to her—but he’d been calm and never for a moment out of control. She’d pushed, and he’d pushed back—but he’d never been violent. He’d never even raised his voice. It was ultimately why she'd let the ghosts stay. It was her responsibility to keep the humans in her care safe, starting with, above all else, her family. If the ghosts didn't understand that, she wasn't going to sit them down and explain it.

Ghostwriter nods, not looking particularly bothered by the admission or her cool response. 

“A regular force of nature!” Ghostwriter says. “We were all very impressed.”

The strangest part is, he seems to mean it. He’s starting to warm up, and not just from the mug still steaming in his hands. 

“But truly, it’s not so surprising!” he says. “How could it be, when you’re related to—”

“—Hi, mo—ah!” 

Maddie spins on her heel as she recognizes her son’s voice. He looks shocked to find a ghost in their kitchen—pale and shivering, so scared she can’t help but step to his side and pull him close.

“It’s okay Danny,” she says. “I know it’s strange, but—”

But what? He’d get used to it? The ghost wouldn’t hurt him? She can’t guarantee that—a part of her doesn’t even want to. 

“—but we’re going to get through this,” she decides. “I’m going to do everything I can to keep you safe.”

Ghostwriter doesn’t get the memo. At the sight of a second human, he grins.

“Danny!” he says. “It’s nice to see you again!”

It grates for a moment, sounds off—but they did meet, when all the ghosts came through. Jack had introduced them both to the whole delegation.

“This is Ghostwriter,” Maddie says. “Did you know ghosts drink coffee?”

Danny bites his lip. 

“Oh!” Ghostwriter says, catching both of their attention. “Sorry, I wasn’t going to drink this. The smell just helps me with writer’s block.”

He approaches, and reflexively, Maddie’s hand curls over her son’s shoulder. 

“For you,” he says, passing the mug to Danny, who looks surprised to have a ghost looking at him like it doesn’t want to hurt him. “I’m sure you could use a pick me up after—”

“—Thanks, Ghost Writer,” Danny says firmly (what?), taking the mug. “I don’t really drink coffee, though.”

Ghostwriter steps back, seemingly noticing Maddie’s icy demeanor for the first time since they first saw each other.

“For the Mother, then,” he says hastily. “I suppose I should get back to the other ghosts. We’ll see each other this afternoon?”

Danny nods along with Maddie, and on the spot, Ghostwriter disappears. As soon as he’s gone, Maddie takes the mug loosely curled in Danny’s hands. It’s ice cold, and she decides quickly it’s not a good sign.

“No one’s drinking this,” she says firmly. “Who knows if it’s contaminated?”

Danny’s spine straightens ever so slightly. “I don’t think the Ghost Writer’s trying to poison us,” he says.

“Contamination isn’t always on purpose,” she allows. “I’ll run tests today. Oh—”

She glances at the clock on the wall—

“You’re going to be late for Mr. Lancer’s class if you don’t eat soon,” she notices. “C’mon, I’ll make you a bagel. Do you want cream cheese or—”

“Cream cheese,” he’s quick to say. 

She sets the mug down on the counter and gets to work. When her kids are out the door (it doesn't slam; Danny's out first, this time), she grabs the mug (and the rest of the coffee pot, for good measure) and takes it down to the lab. She’s not able to work on the real problem, but she can run any other test she wants. She dares a ghost to tell her otherwise.

No matter what she does, the mug of coffee comes back as completely normal, as does the rest of the pot. Just in case, she dumps both and scrubs them clean for good measure.

When she comes up from the lab, her peers are already busy; however, instead of working on their individual projects, the scientists are surrounding another of the ghosts. 

She’s seen him before: the electronics ghost. He’s yelling answers to questions as he works on one of their instruments—Maddie can’t help but feel a little affronted by the whole thing, actually. A ghost, working on their tools? What if he sabotages them? What if he doesn’t understand their intent and ruins them? She wants to ask them what they’re thinking…and she does, if a bit in a roundabout way.

“WHICH IS WHY I, TECHNUS, AM BEST SUITED TO CORRECTING THIS HUMAN MISTAKE—”

“We’re not supposed to be working on anything related to the problem,” she says sternly to the ghost as she cuts a path straight towards him. “You all made it very clear you didn’t want to do anything until four.”

The ghost turns and Maddie notes that his dark lenses hide his eyes very well. 

“HUNTRESS!” he says. “HAVE YOU COME FOR A DEMONSTRATION OF MY SUPERIOR TECHNICAL PROWESS?” 

“I’ve come for an explanation of why you’re breaking our agreement,” Maddie says, leaving no room for argument in her tone. “We’re going to figure out what’s going on in the ghost zone—”

“NOT WITH THIS SUBPAR EQUIPMENT YOU WON’T!” the ghost says gleefully. Rivera looks a little put out by the declaration. “WHICH IS WHY I, TECHNUS, AM LENDING MY VAST KNOWLEDGE IN ALL THINGS GHOSTLY AND ELECTRONICAL!”

Maddie frowns. “So we’re allowed to work on the tech we’ll be using to fix the problem, but we aren’t allowed to try to fix the problem?”

“EXACTLY!”

She forgoes rolling her eyes; she’s not sure if the ghost would appreciate the gesture. They hadn’t explicitly banned instrument calibration in their agreement. She had assumed it meant the ghosts wouldn’t want anyone touching any aspect of the project until they were ready to start, but she’d also assumed they’d keep to themselves before they wanted to work.

“Fine,” she says. “But if Walker tries to throw a fit, I’m directing him to you.”

“Why is that though?” Alice pipes up. “It seems like a waste of time not to work when we’re awake, from our perspective.”

“A WASTE OF TIME?” Technus asks. “NONSENSE, FEMALE HUMAN SCIENTIST!”

“Well, it’s not really nonsense,” Rivera says. “It’s empirically a waste of time not to start earlier.”

“ALSO NONSENSE, HUMAN SCIENTIST OF NO PARTICULAR GENDER EXPRESSION! IT IS ABSOLUTELY VITAL THAT WE START NO EARLIER THAN THE AGREED UPON TIME FOR REASONS YOUR HUMAN SCIENTIST MINDS COULD NOT COMPREHEND!”

“I bet we could comprehend, if you tried to explain it,” Thomas says. “We’re actually quite bright, when you give us the chance.”

“Good luck,” Maddie says under her breath, turning and heading back to the lab. If the others want to talk in circles with ghosts, she’ll leave them to it; as it is, she had her fill of it yesterday.

“THE NONSENSIEST OF THEM ALL!” Technus says. “HOW CAN WE WORK TO FIX YOUR BRAINS, WHEN YOUR TOOLS STILL NEED UPGRADES? ONE STEP AT A TIME, FAWNING HUMANS! I, TECHNUS, WILL GUIDE YOU DOWN THE PATH TO MASTERY OF ALL THINGS—”

The lab door shuts behind her, and Maddie spends the rest of the morning with the old ghost text. She prefers the dead language to languishing with the dead, any day.

Finally, 4pm comes, and they get to work.

They decided already on how this would work: a general meeting first where tasks would be assigned based on what was found the day before, followed by breaking into groups depending on what was needed at the time. For this particular meeting, it was agreed beforehand that the Fentons would give a presentation on the general state of the ghost zone and what they understand about ghosts. Everyone needed to be on the same page as to what they knew and what they didn’t, and the Fentons figured this would be the easiest way to catch everyone up to speed.

When the time comes for their presentation, they throw up a projector and jump into what they know about ghost biology and the workings of the ghost zone.

She talks about how ghosts are made of energy and that they get their power from the ghost zone and goes into depth about why disrupting the ghost zone might spell an untimely second end to the ghosts. Jack jumps in with their discoveries of the ghost zone, how it functions, how it might stop functioning, and what they might be able to do to get it functioning again.

Throughout the process, she’s met with polite questions from the other scientists. The ghosts don’t speak, although from the few glances she gets of their faces, she gets the impression they want to. Ember in particular looks like she’s about to jump out of her seat, but something stops her—maybe Skulker’s hand on her arm?

She only looks at her kids once. Jazz looks bored, but Maddie didn’t expect anything else from her eldest. Danny, on the other hand, looks wildly uncomfortable—as she speaks, she watches him bite his hand every so often and glance at one of the ghosts, looking so uncomfortable she has half a mind to send him away. His leg bounces nervously at his side, and she resolves not to look his way anymore, because it’s just making her feel worse. She’ll need to talk to him again about staying at one of his friends’ houses. This much stress can’t be good for him.

Once, she catches the ghost in the red suit glancing her son’s way, an eyebrow raised. Her eyes crinkle like she can’t believe he’s here. Maddie’s about to speak up and embarrass the hell out of her for bothering her child in the middle of a presentation she wanted to be at, but before she can, Danny turns his head away from the presentation and meets the ghost’s stare head on. Maddie doesn’t see what he does, but the ghost’s face closes off and she lets her eyes drift up back to the presentation. Maddie’s heart swells at how brave her boy is for standing up for himself to a ghost. She decides that she won’t talk to him about staying at a friend’s house for now—maybe this type of exposure will help him face his fear, in the long run.

When they finish the presentation, they receive applause. The human side of the table is excited by what they’ve learned—the ghosts are a bit more reserved in their enthusiasm, but she can’t fault them for it. She can’t imagine they’ve learned very much about themselves in the last hour, but as long as they don’t have anything to add to what she’s saying, she won’t complain about their lackluster response.

“That’s what we have so far,” she says to the ghosts, meeting each one’s eye to gauge their reactions. “If you’ve got anything to share about what’s causing the destabilization and how it could be fixed, now’s the time to tell us.”

All eight of them—wait, eight?— look amongst themselves, waiting for one of them to jump up and take the lead. Finally, the best dressed of them—a woman in a light blue dress and a large emerald necklace—stands.

She introduces herself as a princess—Princess Dorathea, first of her name, Regent of the Eastern Quarter, and so on, Maddie doesn’t really remember the whole title if she’s being honest, never really saw the point in the respect royalty seemed to demand, like they were entitled to it without an ounce of work put towards earning it—and tells the group what she knows.

Maddie takes careful notes as it’s explained that the problem started a few weeks after the last king fell. Maddie’s quick to jot down that the timing could be coincidence, but doesn’t interrupt. Since they noticed the problem, pockets of destabilization have continued to appear and grow throughout the ghost zone, and the ghosts have exhausted traditional methods to dealing with a problem of this magnitude. 

“We’ve been advised that a ghost problem could potentially have a human answer,” she says. “Anyone in this room might be the key to stabilizing the ghost zone and saving Earth in the process. If we work together, I believe we can succeed.”

“Just what is the time frame we’re looking at here?” Maddie asks. “How long until it’s terminal?”

Dorathea’s voice doesn’t waiver when she says, “the damage will be irreparable in no longer than two months. The ghost zone will be completely lost in four, and Earth will follow shortly after.”

Next to her, Danny slouches in his chair.

The whole room is quiet at the revelation.

“I’ll remind everyone in this room now,” Maddie says, “that the difference between success and failure could be the hours lost from not working before four every day. I highly recommend that you recon—”

The princess cuts her off. “We will not. If we are to succeed,” she gestures at the ghosts around her, “it must be under these constraints. Please do not bring them up again, my lady.”

Maddie nods; from her periphery, she can tell the other scientists aren’t happy, but for the sake of making this whole thing work, they’ll comply.

“Well, it’s after four now,” Jack says, breaking the silent tension between the groups. “I guess we better get to work!”

An understatement to the highest degree, but it’s enough to get everyone moving into something resembling the right direction.

They’ve got their work cut out for them, that’s for sure.

The humans spend the first week coming up with ideas and bouncing them off the ghosts, who have split into groups to work with the humans.

The ghosts are helpful on an individual level—actually, Maddie should rephrase that. Most of the ghosts are helpful on an individual level; the last one, the knight, offers nothing to either group.

Maddie finds him in the portal room after their first meeting adjourns, standing tall next to the gate to the ghost zone like he had every right to be there. He doesn’t speak when spoken to, doesn’t even look away from the space his eyes rest on the wall. His sword tip digs into the lab floor, both hands clasped over it, and he paints the perfect picture of a soldier vigilantly keeping watch over his post.

Maddie doesn’t want him there, but when she pushes, Walker is quick to let her know that the Fright Knight only takes orders from their king.

“He’s not letting anyone, human or ghost, in or out while we’re here,” Walker says. “I figured it’d be a relief not to have to deal with anyone coming through while there’s work to be done. Best not to push too hard against a good thing, Watcher.”

Maddie’s not impressed by these little pet names in the slightest, but until they’re a problem, she won’t treat them like one.

On the fifth day of working together, Maddie sees Alice is wearing a name tag: Dr. Alice Nguyen, Associate Professor, University of Anchorage. 

Maddie asks her about it on their way up to get something to eat. 

Alice laughs. 

“They keep asking me for my name,” she admits. 

“Who?” Maddie thinks that Rivera’s memory can’t be that bad.

“The ghosts,” Alice says, and yeah, that makes more sense.

“Which ones?” Some do seem more put together than others. She would bet money that Technus was on that list.

Alice shrugs. “All of them, actually.”

“Really? All of them?" All of them? Most of them seemed to get hers right, as well as Jack's, nicknames notwithstanding. They’ve never gotten Danny’s name wrong either, and even though Jazz doesn’t spend much of her free time in the lab once the kids are dismissed, she’s always been spoken to by name when a ghost wants her attention.

“All of them,” Alice confirms. “I’ve noticed they get your name right.”

Maddie says, “if it’s just you, I can talk to them about—”

Alice brushes the offer away good-naturedly. 

“It’s everyone who’s not a Fenton,” she says. “Rivera and the Campbells have noticed, too. Maybe it’s different, since you live here and we don’t. Either way, we want to run some social experiments with them. There’s got to be a reason they’re doing this.”

“Maybe there is,” Maddie agrees, privately thinking that the ghosts could just be being rude. “Either way, I can’t imagine it’ll last. They’ll have to get used to you soon, or it’ll be a problem.”

“Will it?” Alice muses. “I just think it’s interesting that there’s a difference, y’know? I wonder why they made the distinction. And why include the kids? They barely see them, in comparison to how often we bump into them. It’s just…interesting! I can’t say it enough, but I’m really grateful for the opportunity to get to know them better. Their afterlives must be fascinating!”

Maddie feels a bit of tension bleed out of her. She’s glad her friend doesn’t feel bad about the cold shoulder she’s receiving. Maddie isn’t the least bit surprised that the ghosts aren’t very welcoming. As Alice climbs the rest of the stairs to the kitchen, she thinks that maybe it’s the ghosts who should be grateful for a chance to get to know people like Alice.

Did Maddie mention that the ghosts are helpful on an individual level? Yes? She did?

Together, they’re horrible.

“Forgive my bluntness, but I’m afraid that won’t do it,” the Ghostwriter concludes, barely looking up from the book he’s writing in. “An attempt based on that…there’d be disaster due to it.” 

Stunned silence on the human side of the table is their initial response.

It’s their first potential solution. Jack’s only just introduced it, has barely gotten to the third slide in their presentation, and she can’t help but ask, rather meanly,

“How do you know?”

He turns a page and continues to write.

“We’ve tried introducing different types of energy into the areas already,” Skulker says. “They don’t stick, and it just turned out to be a waste of resources. Unless you want to try a type of energy besides electricity, ectoplasm, or radiation, it won’t work.”

Maddie tries to keep her breathing even. She looks instead at her team for ideas.

They try, but at the end of the day, they don’t have anything else to present at the moment. All the feedback they receive from the ghosts can be boiled down to a single, infuriating sentence: it won’t work, and the ghosts won't explain why.

The meeting adjourns with little improvement to Maddie's mood.

“...just think it was rude to speak without looking us in the eye, is all, Jack,” Maddie’s saying. “Ghostwriter couldn’t—”

“Uh, you mean the Ghost Writer?” Danny interrupts as he’s passing by the kitchen, on his way out the door.

Maddie blinks. “Ghostwriter,” she says.

Danny grimaces, barely slowing down on his path to the front of the house. 

“Ghost Writer,” he corrects. “Two words. He said it the other day, remember?”

Maddie remembers the conversation, but before she can ask why he thinks it’s a title instead of a name, the door slams shut behind him.

“Ghost Writer?” she asks Jack, who shrugs. 

“I dunno Mads, maybe he’s right?” he asks. “There were so many names in the beginning, I was struggling to keep up! It’s crazy how different all these ghosts are when we’re not shooting at them on sight. Y’know, the other day, I found one of them in the bathroom!”

Maddie lets out a surprised laugh.

“The bathroom?” she asks.

Jack laughs with her. “Craziest thing! I actually only opened the door ‘cause I thought I heard Danny in there, too, and no ghost is gonna be cornering a member of my family without hearing about it from me! But it was just the one that calls himself Technus, fiddling with the space heater like he’d never seen one before. Gave me a whole speech about how ghosts don’t get cold. Fascinating stuff, Mads!”

Maddie smiles, thankful that Danny hadn’t been involved with one of the ghosts, after all. As she cleans up the table, she can’t help but wonder a bit about something Jack said to her. 

She’s seen ghosts shiver before, if only for a moment. 

Maddie wonders to herself where Phantom is, and why he didn’t care enough about his home to look for a way to save the ghost zone alongside the other ghosts.

She brushes the thought off quickly enough, because once again, Ghostwriter appears in the kitchen. By now, Maddie’s forced herself to stop flinching and reaching for her weapon just because a ghost is nearby; they’ve sworn up and down that they’re here for help, and the situation, however tenuous, will be apocalyptic if both sides have a falling out. She can rely on the mutually assured destruction she was promised if nothing else, and that is enough for now.

Ghostwriter pours himself a cup of coffee and nods at both of them when he sees he isn’t alone. He doesn’t say much of anything, and Maddie is content to meet his silence with her own. Jack, however, is a different story.

“Hey,” he says, “settle a bet?”

The ghost looks momentarily surprised, but he nods, holding the coffee up to his face. The stem fogs up his glasses before he pulls it away.

“Is your name one word, or two?” Jack asks.

“Two,” Ghost Writer confirms. “Ah, but if you’ll excuse me, I’m needed elsewhere; if I stay any longer, I’ll be late. May I bid a good morning to the Guardians of the Gate?”

He finishes with his coffee quickly and sets it down on the table. 

“Forgive the slip,” he says. “I’ll be going now.”

Before either of them can say anything, the ghost vanishes on the spot.

“That guy likes rhyming,” Jack decides in the quiet between them. 

Maddie snorts and grabs the still-warm mug off the table. She dumps its contents down the drain and begins washing the cup.

“Ghosts that like rhyming,” she says. “Must be the end of the world.”

Jack stands and walks to her side, planting a kiss on her cheek.

“Not if we can help it, Mads,” he says. “The first idea was a bust, but I have a feeling the next one’s going to work!”

“It’s not going to work,” Ember says, arms crossed as she leans back in her chair. 

Maddie grits her teeth as Rivera looks over to the ghost who announced their third approach was a waste of time with a barely concealed grimace. Two weeks now, wasted to a horrible game of darts where they’re expected to hit a perfect bullseye with the dartboard hidden in a different room.  

“Why not?” she asks, trying to keep poison from spilling out of her mouth in the name of diplomacy.

“You’re treating the ghost zone like it’s Earth,” the red headed ghost—Spectra—says. “These aren’t icebergs that just need to be surrounded by cooler water to be nursed back to health. The destabilization areas can’t be fixed one by one—it’s all or nothing.”

“Why didn’t you tell us that after we proposed nearly the same thing a week ago?” Thomas asks, raising his hands like he can placate any of them if he just lifts them high enough. “We’re going to have to start over from scratch, now.”

The ghosts make their excuses and by the end of the meeting, the only thing they can agree on is that no progress has been made. Maddie walks up the stairs behind her son. When she rests a hand on his shoulder, it’s fraught with tension. Maddie understands; she feels the exact same way.

When she’s with her family that night, it comes up in conversation.

“Two weeks of work, wasted,” Jack says. “You’d think the spooks didn’t want us to find an answer!”

“But…” Danny says, “you will find one, right?”

Maddie smiles at him and loads more potatoes on his plate. “Of course we will, honey,” she says.

Her son hesitates, pushing a pile of peas across his plate.

“I thought there was only a month and a half left,” Danny finally says. “What if you can’t?”

She frowns. “There’s three and a half months left,” she says. “Plenty of time for us to figure something out.”

“...oh,” Danny says, and doesn’t talk for the rest of their meal.

The humans begin Wednesday of week three with another meeting, this time, right after dinner. The ghosts keep scraping their ideas, and it’s time they came together and figure out what it is they’re getting wrong. 

Their guests are sharing the couch, Maddie and Jack are standing, and Danny and Jazz sit in the loveseat between them. Her kids don’t want to be there, but she knows they’re bright, and she’s hoping they might catch something obvious that the rest of them have been missing.

“They don’t think we know the composition of the ghost zone,” she says. “We’ve run more tests in the last two weeks than the ghosts have probably run period, but they think we’re missing something. What we need to figure out is what, since they apparently don’t have the words for it.”

“If they can’t explain it, what makes them think we can even grasp it?” Cassandra asks. “Why can’t they focus on the specifics, let us make single changes to our prototypes until they can’t complain anymore?”

“I have a feeling it’s not a fault in our mechanics, is the thing,” Alice says. “It’s got to be something like we’re missing an entire step in the process. What is it about the ghost zone that is so other that they can’t describe it to us? What is so alien about their world that we wouldn’t understand?”

“Maybe it’s something we can’t measure?” Jack wonders. “Although I can’t imagine what; we’ve already taken every consideration we could think of into account!”

“Anything that would impact our side of the equation, at least,” Maddie says. “At some point, the variables are so small in impact we have to act like they’re negligible, or we’ll go insane.”

“Then what’s left?” Rivera asks. 

They trade ideas back and forth, arguing the merits of each of them before, eventually, discarding them entirely. Jazz has started stifling her yawns, and Danny looks like he’s about to fall over. She’ll have to send them to bed soon.

“You’d think they’d have the words to tell us about their plane,” Cassandra complains. “We can describe Earth in about a thousand different measures…what makes their world so different?”

Danny, who is leaning on one of the loveseat’s arms and looking very out of his element, pipes up:

“What makes you think it’s a world to them?” he asks. “From what I’ve been hearing, it’s their home. It’s like you asking me to describe my house. It’s not really special in any big way; it’s got doors and walls and a roof. I’ve never even thought about measuring my house…but I know it’s mine.”

He stops suddenly, looking embarrassed as he realizes that all eyes are on him.

“Go on,” Thomas says, though Maddie can't help but wonder how sincere he’s being.

“Well…I could walk through it blindfolded. I know where everything is, even if it’s in a cupboard or hidden away. I’ve got memories here. It feels like home when I come in. Ghosts probably feel the same thing.”

Rivera is eying her son very carefully.

“What’s the distinction?” they ask. “Between our home and theirs, what could the difference be?”

Danny shrugs. “Well, ghosts don’t live in houses,” he tells them. “They live in haunts. Maybe there’s a difference between how a haunt works and how other things work.”

The Campbells are looking at each other pensively while Rivera and Alice whisper back and forth. When they break, Maddie sees excitement in their eyes.

“Maybe there is a difference,” she says. “I think at the very least, we need to find out for sure.”

Jack walks over and ruffles Danny’s hair.

“We’ll make a scientist out of you yet, son!” he says, delight in his eyes. “You’ll go from studying spooks to shooting at them in no time!”

Danny’s laugh is a bit forced, but Maddie doesn’t begrudge him for it. New ideas are spinning in her mind, wondering if his haunt idea could hold any merit, if it could change anything about what they’re doing…

And it might. It might, and in that moment, all the energy in the room is palpable, and Maddie’s beyond excited to try her son’s theory out.

She asks Danny what gave him the idea. He looks away, almost bashfully, and says,

“It gets kinda boring when everyone’s busy. I…was actually trying to read that book you showed me a while ago, and it said that.”

All Maddie can think as she looks at her youngest is he just proved that he had needed ghostscript at least once in the next fifty years, and not even a month had passed before it happened. If she weren’t so proud of him, she might be smug.

“Well, let's see if it gets us anywhere,” she says, flashing Danny a smile. He smiles back, but quickly excuses himself to go to bed. Jazz follows seconds later, catching up to him on the stairs. They’re bickering about something, but Maddie’s too swept up by the science happening around her to make sure they aren’t fighting. 

She’ll check on them both tomorrow. 

(Except tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes, and Maddie, down in the lab, forgets the matter entirely.)

Chapter Text

The nature of this arrangement is that conversations are ripe to be overheard.

Maddie usually considers herself above eavesdropping, but she’s beginning to recognize the ghosts by voice alone, and this particular conversation is between two that she’s least familiar with. 

The first has introduced herself as a princess…the second hasn’t introduced herself at all.

“—t’s weird being in like…his haunt. Usually we’re out in a second. Did anyone even ask him if it was okay?” the unknown ghost says. Maddie can’t tell what they’re doing—she thinks if she looks around the corner, they’d see her in an instant—

“It’s not permanent. Besides, we have permission,” Dorathea responds firmly. “The situation is—”

“But did we ask?” 

“Kitty, you know the stakes. We can’t leave until everything’s fixed, and as long as he doesn’t make us leave, we have to stay,” Dorathea says. Kitty, Maddie realizes. The unknown ghost’s name is Kitty.

They’re talking about Jack, she thinks. Who else could own the 'haunt' they ghosts are currently stuck inside? It’s a little old-fashioned, but she can understand their propensity towards gendered thinking, especially the princess. Maddie is secure in the knowledge that she and her husband are a team and really couldn’t care less about what two teenage ghosts thought about her. Still…

“But…” 

Dorathea sighs. “I know,” she says. “I don’t like it either. But it’s the entire zone, Kitty. Unless you think we should just wake Pariah up—” 

“I don’t think that—” 

“Well, there’s no one else left then! Plasmius is refusing to step in, I think his stupid ego’s still bruised after Clockwork made it clear he wasn’t—” 

“But could he do it?”

“Apparently not!”

“...it’s just weird is all.”

Another sigh, but less exasperated this time. There’s a rustling of fabric and Maddie tenses, thinking she's been found out, but it’s over a second later.

“It’s going to be okay,” Dorathea says. “We’re going to make things right.”

Kitty says something Maddie doesn’t catch—it’s muffled and whining, almost distressed. 

Dorathea says, (rather curtly, in Maddie’s opinion): “better that than another tyrant!”

Kitty only sighs. “I guess,” she says. “It’s just…”

“Weird?”

Another sigh. “Yeah, Dora. Weird.”

The ghosts drop the conversation, and Maddie figures it’s time to leave. 

As she goes, she can only wonder what that had been about.

School is finally out for the Summer, and Maddie’s happy to have her kids home. 

Now she just needs to figure out a way to spend some time with them while trying to save the world.

“...it won’t work,” Kitty says. It’s the first time she’s addressed the room, and Maddie hopes it’s the last. 

“Why are we here?” Cassandra fires right back. “You want our help, but you refuse to help us. It’s been a month, and there’s nothing to show for it! At this rate, your whole world is going to rip itself apart, and ours will follow! We worked on this together, Kitty; you said it could work!”

“Something must have been overlooked,” Skulker says, drawing Cassandra's ire away from Kitty. “This theory’s aligning more within the realm of possibility, but it still won’t fix the ghost zone.”

Next to her, Danny sighs. She glances over at him and wonders if the bags under his eyes have gotten worse.

“Tell us what we’re looking for, then!” Thomas says. “We can’t work like this. The well’s going to run dry, and when we’re out of ideas, it’ll be because you haven’t done your part in directing us!”

Jazz looks mad. She hasn’t said one word about anything that’s taken over their lives for the past few weeks, but Maddie can tell from her posture alone, her daughter is livid. Maddie doesn’t blame her, but she does think it’s an ill omen. It takes a lot to make her daughter mad, and if Jazz is mad…the situation must look even worse from the outside. Her kids have mostly been sitting and waiting around, attending meetings to stay informed (and because the ghosts had invited them to the table, and it hadn’t seemed like a bad idea to include Danny and Jazz instead of keeping them in the dark at the time), but had only seen failures in theory spinning, technical builds, and communication across the board. 

One month in, and all her kids see are rising tensions. Anger is becoming more and more difficult to hold down, and the act of doing so to uphold relations between ghosts and humans is becoming quite the bitter pill to swallow. 

Have they heard the humans arguing amongst each other at night? Have they heard them arguing with the ghosts? Maddie couldn’t say either way. But as she pushes herself to her feet, she can say:

“This isn’t getting us anywhere. We’ll take a break and reconvene in ten minutes. I’ll remind everyone that there’s only a month left to salvage the ghost zone, and not much more to save our home.”

Jazz is first to leave the table and is up the stairs before Maddie’s standing up, and ill omens begin to pile atop each other as the door to the lab slams shut behind her.

Maddie’s not surprised when Jazz tells her that night that she’s got permission to stay at a friend’s house for a few weeks.

She thinks about trying to persuade her daughter to stay, but there’s a gleam in her eyes that tells Maddie her daughter would perhaps love to have this fight with her right now.

Maddie sighs.

“I’ll text you when we’re done, okay sweetie?” she asks, running a hand through her daughter’s hair. “Just give me a call if you need anything, and I’ll be there.”

Jazz doesn’t say anything to that.

She comes back down from her room a few minutes later, bag in hand. She’s frowning, but when she leaves, she catches the door behind her, and is gone without a sound.

It’s almost a relief, in some ways.

In many others, it’s abject, personal, failure; Maddie swallows the guilt threatening to rise and heads down to the lab.

The readings are getting worse.

It’s something everyone can agree on, at least.

As Maddie slowly finishes another idea (this invention aims to purify existing energy near the destabilized sites, and it’s an original enough idea that she’s very excited to have the proof of concept nearly done and still somewhat excited to present it to the room of critics with a rich history of tearing her ideas to pieces), Alice stands at her side and puts a cool hand on her shoulder.

“Thought you needed to see this,” she says, and hands Maddie a small stack of papers. 

Her heart skips a beat as she reads the abstract. When it gets back on rhythm, it pounds twice as hard in her chest.

“This can’t be!” she denies. Alice doesn’t bother hiding her grimace. Across from them, Ember, who has been helping keep the ectoplasm Maddie’s working with steady, shoots them a questioning look.

“Destabilization has sped up,” Maddie says, throat tight as she gets the words out. “We’ve lost a week.”

Glass breaks behind them.

“A week?”

Maddie turns on a dime to the door that Danny’s now standing in, the glass of water she had requested from him a mess on the floor.

“A week,” Ember says, and Danny jumps and looks right at her. Her gaze steadily meets his, and Maddie thinks she’s trying to scare him. Danny glares right back at her, shoulders thrown back defiantly. When he approaches her, Maddie pulls him into a hug. Behind them, Alice moves to get a towel for the mess.

“But you’ll think of something, right?” he asks, a waiver to his voice that makes her heart drop. “There’s a way to fix it, there has to be!”

“There is a way,” Ember interrupts. “We wouldn’t be here if we thought it was hopeless.”

Maddie pats his head softly. Ember is still watching them, and Maddie shoots her a glare. She didn’t know ghosts could be so nosy until she started living with nine of them. When Ember finally looks away, there’s an ill at ease guilt clear on her face. 

“You have to do it,” Danny says so softly that Maddie almost misses it. “Please…”

He says it like he’s begging her, and it sets off every last ounce of motherly instinct Maddie has. 

“We’re going to figure it out,” Maddie says firmly, pulling away so she can look him in the eyes. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about, pumpkin.”

“I…I just don’t want to lose you.” Danny looks away when he says it, and Maddie’s heart swells.

“Let’s take a break,” she says to the room. Before anyone agrees, she takes her sweet son’s hand and pulls him along. “And how about I make you something to eat?”

Danny grips her hand properly and gives it a squeeze.

“You’re sure it’s okay?” he asks. “I don’t want to distrac—”

“You’re not a distraction,” Maddie declares as they pass some of the other teams, all engrossed with their own projects. “You’re my son.”

He squeezes her hand again, and Maddie can’t help but decide right then and there: no matter how all of this ends, whether with them saving the world or failing, Maddie would spend every last bit of time she could with her family. 

On the way out, Danny startles and pulls her back for a moment. Curious, Maddie turns to see him digging through his pocket before pulling out something she hadn’t worked on in ages: a Fenton Thermos.

“I saw it stuck under a machine earlier,” he says. “I forgot to give it to you.”

She takes it and turns it upside-down. It's one of the more recent ones—she had wondered for a moment if he'd found the first one, which they still couldn't find. She attaches it to her belt nonetheless. 

“Thank you!” she says, making sure he sees how happy she was at the gesture. “Now, how does a plate of warm chocolate chip cookies sound?”

His stomach rumbles, and Maddie laughs and takes it as an answer.

As she lines the dough on her favorite sheet, Danny sitting at the table patiently waiting, her mind is taken back to the thermos at her hip.

Another idea starts to take shape in her mind as the cookies go in, and by the time Danny’s munching on one, it’s got a form of its own.

She brings another plate back down to Jack, and while he’s eating, explains: “The destabilizations could be something like contamination. We created the tech to contain a ghost…maybe we need to make something that contains raw ectoplasm!”

It’s always good to have something on the back burner. She and Jack work well into the night, and she thinks they’ll have an invention from the idea in a week. 

The smell of fresh cookies follows her as she leaves, the thermos bouncing on her thigh as she hikes up the stairs and tells the other humans what they’ve come up with.

Sometimes, when it’s very late and the others (human and ghost alike) have gone to bed, Maddie goes down to the portal to think.

Weeks and weeks of expecting ghosts everywhere never quite rid her of how surprised she is by the knight, still standing guard over the portal when she enters the room. Ever-present, ever-menacing…she wonders what he thinks of all of this.

What would a knight be doing so far from his kingdom, anyway?

She tried asking him questions in the beginning, but he’s never so much as twitched at another being’s presence in the lab. He’s content to ignore her, so she does the same, planting herself in a corner and picking up the ghostscript book waiting for her return.

She flips idly through the pages, trying to see if all of this fraternizing with the enemy has somehow made her any better at reading their language. No such luck, of course; if she wants to learn, she’ll have to do it by herself. 

Maddie’s used to nothing coming easy these days, and puts the book down again.

She pulls out her phone and stares at the dark screen for a moment, finally steeling herself to dial the number she’d been contemplating for the last few days.

The phone rings once…twice…and on the third ring, he picks up.

“Maddie!” Vlad says, the surprise in his voice quickly mixing with pleasure. “What has you up at this hour? Forgive my bluntness, but it’s quite late, my dear.”

Another nickname to ignore. Maddie forces a smile to her lips.

“Hi Vlad,” she says, “sorry to be calling so late. I was just—”

“Lonely?” he guesses in that special way where he pretends he’s joking with her, but social convention dictates she ignore it unless she’s willing to tell Jack it’s her fault his best friend won’t speak to him anymore.

“Not lonely,” she says, eying the knight to her side. “In fact, I can’t get a moment alone, these days.”

Vlad lets out a low, controlled chuckle. “Well, if you ever need to run away from it all, I’ve got some wonderful houses all over you might be able to borrow.”

“I was actually hoping to pick your brain,” Maddie says, quick to shut down any mention of ‘running away’ for any period of time. She still wonders how serious he is, if he even means to say the things he’s saying at all. Is she being paranoid, or is he really out to get her?

“I’m all ears, dear,” he says lightly.

She takes a breath.

“I was wondering if you might be able to come here, instead,” she says in a rush. 

“Oh?” Vlad asks. “Do you need a babysitter? I’d love to see Daniel and Jasmine again.”

“Jack and I aren’t going anywhere,” she tells him. “But there’s a problem, and I’m hoping you might be able to help us fix it.”

“...is that so?”

“About six weeks ago, we were contacted by ghosts,” Maddie says. Vlad’s breath hitches ever so slightly, but he doesn’t speak. “They asked us for help saving the ghost zone. It’s destabilizing, and no one can figure out how to stop it. I was hoping—”

She stops, absolutely shocked to hear to realize that he's laughing. Loudly, deeply, tinged with more than a little bitterness—she hasn’t heard him sound so earnest in twenty years. She’s too surprised to even be angry at it; as the laughter peters off, she hears him sigh and reign himself in once again.

“I care about you a great deal Maddie, but don’t contact me about this again,” he says sharply, and hangs up.

Maddie pulls the phone away from her ear and stares down at it.

“So much for old friends,” she finally says, hearing the bitterness in her own tone this time.

The knight, ever vigilant in his self-appointed duty, says nothing.

“IT WON’T WORK!” Technus says.

Rivera stifles a curse. 

“It won’t work,” Spectra says.

Cassandra’s lips tighten, but she and Thomas say nothing.

“It won’t work,” Skulker says.

Alice’s hand curls into a fist beside her. The tension in the room is so thick Maddie could cut it with a knife, but for today, that's as far as it gets. She doubts that will last much longer.

Two weeks left. Maddie doesn’t see her son much outside of meetings. He looks pale and he barely speaks unless she asks him a question. It breaks Maddie’s heart, but she can’t stop the work now. Her baby will get better even if she keeps working. Earth is lost if she stops.

She can’t even make meals anymore. They order food and will worry about the bills if they have to. She misses sitting down with her family, but it can’t be helped. 

“It won’t work,” Dorathea says. At least she has the grace to look upset by the announcement.

Jack, the brightest person she knows, dims.

“It won’t work,” Ember says.

Maddie watches Danny simmer with a rage she can’t quite fathom. She’s never seen anger like that on her son’s face.

“It won’t work,” Kitty says.

“It won’t work,” the Ghost Writer says.

“It won’t work,” Walker says.

The humans explode into a chorus of screaming questions, and the ghosts respond with a deluge of their own. The shouting match that follows sets off a migraine that pounds at Maddie’s temples.

She watches, feeling acutely helpless as the careful self-control they’d all been maintaining collapses under the pressure to succeed amidst a growing pile of failure. She catches tidbits that rise above the din:

“Can’t work under these conditions, I can’t believe you have us—”

“Not our fault humans don’t understand the difference between a—”

“—you think we’re going to stand for this, you’ve got another thing—”

On and on they go, and it must be cathartic, because minutes pass with no end in sight.

Maddie rubs at her temples and grits her teeth.

“Listen to me,” she grumbles, not quite ready to make the effort to shout just yet.

“You all think you’re so much better than us—”

“Who even cares, it’s not like we’ve seen anything of value yet—”

“—not too late, maybe there’s other humans who could do a better—”

“Listen to me!” Maddie says, voice raised, but nowhere near loud enough to catch anyone's attention, let alone an angry mob of a room.

They shout, and the noise gets worse, and her headache feels like someone’s shoving an ice spike through her skull. If she could just get them to shut up!

“—don’t get us, don’t get what we need, and—”

“—just want to see us fail, you think you can save—”

“—not our fault he’d rather see us dead than leave—”

“Listen to me!” Maddie finally manages to scream, right at the top of her lungs, but it makes no difference. No one can hear her. No one is listening. If anything, they’re getting louder.

She laughs quietly to herself, trying to keep the frog in her throat down. Tears sting at her eyes, and she’s doing everything she can not to let frustration win.

“Hey.” A new voice cuts through the noise like a sharpened knife through paper. It rings throughout the room and is barely settled before the ghosts fall to absolute silence. The humans, more confused than anything else, are silent a moment later, eyes following the line of the ghosts’ gaze.

Maddie follows too, and all eyes are now on Danny, who is leaning back in his chair, looking angrier than she’s ever seen him before. 

“My mom’s trying to talk,” is all he says.

The ghosts sit down. Still confused, the humans follow suit.

Danny just looks up at her, the anger on his face giving way to exhaustion. The bags under his eyes, she notes, look worse than ever.

“Thank you,” Maddie says to the now silent room. She’ll have to ask him later how he accomplished it; Maddie’s been trying for weeks now to get them all to sit down and listen, and her son’s achieved it in record time.

“As of today, we have one week left before the ghost zone’s problems are irreversible,” she says. “Seven days before your home can’t function, and seven days until the Earth begins following suit. We’re done fighting each other. Either we work together, or we’re going to kill everyone in the process.” 

No one says anything. That’s fine; Maddie doesn’t need anyone’s input right now.

“I want ideas,” she says. “From everyone. I want information. Theories. Anything that could help us get through this. What I can’t take anymore is the hostility you’ve gifted us with at this table.”

Her eyes turn now to the ghosts.

“What is wrong with your home?” she growls. “You asked for help, but you haven’t explained anything about what’s wrong. We know the ghost zone’s ripping itself apart, but you’ve dodged a lot of questions that could help us help you. You left us fumbling for ideas ourselves and acted disappointed when we didn’t get it right, whatever there was to get right. Tell us what’s wrong, right now, and we’ll fix it. But if you can’t, you might as well leave, because I can’t think of a way it’s possible to work together when you can’t even give us this much.”

The ghosts look at each other for a long time.

“Our king—” Dorathea begins.

“Dora!” Kitty hisses, grabbing the princess’ arm. Kitty is roughly shaken off, and Dorathea addresses the humans.

“We hope there’s a way,” she says. “But we’ve tried everything. Every expert we could find, from the Far Frozen to the Observants themselves. Our king…is refusing his throne. Without him to guide us, to guide the ghost zone…we’re doomed.”

Skulker stands, ignoring the screech of his chair against the lab floor, and says, “we’re almost out of options. Time is against us. You have a choice, here, but you have a responsibility to us, too. For the good of the ghost zone and Earth, you must do this unfair, awful task. We don’t know how else to show you what must be done, or how to prove to you…” 

“We aren’t cruel, despite what you’ve been taught,” Dorathea says. “We can be kind. We can be teachers, peers, subjects…whatever it is you desire, we’ll be all that and more. Anything you request of us, we can do our best to achieve. But without you, we won’t survive.”

The Ghost Writer finally stands. “If you choose to forsake us, we can’t fight against it. But on behalf of all ghosts, we beg of you, perhaps for the last time: we’ve tried everything. There’s nothing left to be done. There’s no healing to be had or a future without you. Come home.” 

Come home?

The ghosts won’t look her in the eyes. They seem to be done, but no one else can bring themselves to fill the silence. Maddie feels her mouth open and close, but words don’t follow.

Once again, a single, strong voice pierces through the quiet when all others fail.

“Fine,” her son says with fire in his eyes, and every ghosts’ back snaps up straight. “There’s no other way. I get it. I’m done.”

He pushes himself out of his seat and without another word, marches out of the room.

Maddie watches him go, and while it shouldn’t, it feels like a personal failure when he forgets to catch the door to the lab before it slams shut behind him.

Chapter Text

They ask more questions, of course. Even now, the ghosts are cagey, but they’re slowly opening up. In the next hour, Maddie learns more about the ghost zone than she ever could from the book still sitting on her table. 

She just hopes that it’ll be enough.

After the meeting, the ghosts retreat to their floor. Jack and the others stay in the lab to work, but Maddie doesn’t remain. She’s still got to make something for Danny to eat, after all. He doesn’t request anything special when she asks what he wants, so she dices some chicken and starts sautéing it. As she’s cutting veggies, Danny comes into the kitchen. He stands right behind her, and Maddie knows something’s wrong when he doesn’t say anything. She pushes the now cooked chicken off the heat and turns to him.

His eyes are red-rimmed, and immediately, she feels tears threaten to form in her own.

“Mom, I don’t think I can be here anymore,” he says, voice croaky, and there’s no mistaking the fact that he’d been crying. She pulls him into her arms.

“You’ve been so brave,” she tells him immediately. She had known since he’d stormed out earlier this was coming. Danny had been tired for so long…if this was his breaking point, she’d make it as gentle a separation as possible. “You don’t have to stay if it’s too much. I know ghosts can be—”

“I want to stay,” Danny says quietly. “I just don’t think it’s possible.”

“It’s okay, Danny,” she says, running a hand through his hair. He leans into the touch. “You don’t have to force yourself for us. Your father and I can take care of it ourselves.”

Her son heaves a shuddering breath out.

“What will you do when I’m not here?” he asks her.

“Sweetie,” she says, “we’ll miss you, of course! But you can come back and see us! We’ll be able to get this mess with the ghost zone sorted out, and once it’s fixed, it’ll be safe for you to come back.”

“I don’t know if I should,” Danny whispers. “I don’t know if I can.”

Her poor, brave boy. Maddie knows what to say, even if the words are hard to get out.

“You can’t make the decision because you’re afraid for us,” she says. “You need to do what’s best for you, and we’ll always support you, no matter what.”

Danny hugs her tighter, and the frog in Maddie’s throat is difficult to swallow around.

“We love you, Danny,” she says, squeezing him tighter. “If you can’t be around this anymore, we understand. Between you and me, I don’t feel too far off. Just promise me you’ll stay safe if you want to stay at a friend’s house, okay?”

“I promise,” he mumbles into her shoulder. “I love you, too.”

“When do you think you’ll go?” she asks. He tenses.

“...tonight.”

“Do you need a ride?” 

“...no.”

“And you’ll call me when you’re there?”

“Tucker doesn’t have good reception at his house…”

She pulls back from their hug slowly, making sure she doesn’t jar him out of it.

“Send me a letter then,” she jokes. “I don’t know, maybe you can borrow a ghost bird from the—”

Something delicate in his face absolutely shatters, and he pulls her back into a hug before she can finish. She doesn’t know what she said that set him off, but she pulls him back in and hugs him hard, carding her fingers through his hair again.

“Say bye to your dad before you go,” she says once he calms down again. “And if you’re scared, please call us, okay Danny?”

“Okay mom,” he promises.

He’s got a small suitcase in hand about an hour later.

She and Jack are at the door as he comes down the stairs. His eyes are still red-rimmed, but he looks determined, shoulders thrown back as he approaches his parents.

“Be safe, honey,” she says, pulling him into another hug. He goes easily, finally pulling away only to give Jack one, too. He's cool in her arms, and Maddie (who knows how hot her children run when they're upset) is happy that he's feeling calmer.

“We’ll fix the ghost zone in no time, son!” Jack says. “Then we’ll be back to hunting down spooks instead of hosting ‘em!”

Danny lets out a little chuckle for his father’s sake as he pulls back.

“The ghosts aren’t so bad,” he says. “I’m just—”

“You’re fine, Danny,” Maddie says firmly. “Jazz left a while ago. We know we’ve been asking a lot of you this Summer, and you’ve been wonderful. It’s time for you to rest.”

“Rest,” Danny repeats with a snort. 

“Do your best,” Maddie says, stepping around him to pull open the door. Her son dutifully steps over the threshold, but lingers in it briefly. 

“I will,” he says. “And uh…thanks, for everything. You guys are—”

Tears spring forward again, and Maddie, for the strangest reason, is put off by them. It’s not that she’s not okay with her son crying…but he’s only going to a friend’s house for a few days. She pushes the thought away quickly, guilt taking its place. She shouldn’t judge her son’s reaction to his whole life being overturned, even if only temporarily. 

“Have fun at Tucker’s house, okay?” she asks him. “And I’m expecting a letter from you, don’t you forget!”

The joke catches him off guard and startles a shaky laugh out of him.

“The only letter I’ll ever send,” he says solemnly.

Maddie lets out a laugh despite herself. Danny hadn’t lost his dramatic flair, at least. When she meets his eye again, he cracks a small smile. He looks so…

Maddie can’t bear to see him like this.

“Maybe you’ll send more?” she prompts. “I used to send letters all the time!”

Danny shrugs. “Probably not. It’s…so old fashioned, y’know?”

“Danny,” she says, mock offended, “are you calling your mother old?”

It draws a genuine smile out of him, at least. He draws near and says, “love you.” 

He pecks a quick kiss on her cheek. Jack gives him an enthusiastic clap on the back, and for the first time, the force of it doesn’t knock him over, doesn’t even push his shoulder forward. She thinks that he’s done a lot of growing this year, and she’s proud of him.

“We’ll see you soon,” she says, forcing a smile to her face. “Bye, sweetie! We love you!”

Danny flashes her a smile, and she can tell he nearly means it.

“Bye,” he says.

Danny reaches for the knob and swings the door open wide. He steps through it, and Maddie, too far to do anything in time, braces for the slam—but Danny catches the door. He doesn’t say anything else, just lets it gently fall an inch from the frame. It shuts with a quiet click, and the sound feels like it echoes in the hall.

Jack puts a hand over her shoulder.

“He’s a good kid,” he says. “He’ll be fine.”

“He’ll be fine,” she repeats to herself. 

It takes a while, but eventually, she believes it.

Maddie gears herself up to finally work distraction free. Her kids are safe, finally away from the madness of the last few weeks, and now, she can devote all of her time to the problem. 

They’ve got another idea, so out there Maddie has some very big doubts that it’ll pass her peers’ smell test, let alone the ghosts’. 

They had said there was no healing to be had…but Maddie’s not so sure about that. If they can feed energy back into one of the areas that’s losing its structural integrity, there might be a chance the disruption might trick the ghost zone into mending itself, like re-breaking a bone to ensure it heals correctly.

She and Jack spend the next two days going over the proposed logistics, eventually working out a prototype that could carry enough ectoplasm and explosives to work as they theorize. The work is all they can focus on; they’re running out of time, and everyone knows it. They barely eat, barely sleep. They ignore the 4pm rule, and the ghosts don’t bother them about it. They aren’t even running tests anymore on the zone itself, so wrapped up in their project. This might be their last chance, and every last second is for getting this right.

They carry it carefully to the portal room. The ever-imposing knight—the Fright Knight—stands vigilant at his post, hooded eyes staring straight ahead. He doesn’t respond when they enter—doesn’t stop them from laying the prototype on the table. 

“No one else should touch this until we’re ready,” Maddie tells him. 

The knight, predictably, does not respond.

Later, when she brings it up to the other humans, they react better than she thought they would.

“It’s not ideal,” Thomas says. “Hell, it might not do anything.”

“It could provide some much needed data on what will work,” his wife counters, though she doesn’t look very hopeful at the prospect.

Rivera says plainly, “I don’t think this is going to work, Maddie.”

Alice eventually breaks the tie.

“We should ask the ghosts to try it,” she says firmly. “It’s not like we’ve got any better ideas at the moment. Maybe they’ll see something in it we’re missing.”

It’s not a vote of confidence, but she’ll take it nonetheless. 

At 4pm the next day, both delegations sit once more at the table.

Maddie gets right into it, explaining the theory behind their invention and why it might work. She can’t bring herself to look at the ghosts yet. She’s so tired of all the arguing, but if she can at least get through why it might work quickly, they might be able to reach some kind of agreement before the following morning.

She speeds through the presentation, and even to her ears, it’s not her best work. Still, it’s something, and once she turns off the projector and sits down, she steels herself to begin defending her and Jack’s idea.

She’s spooked out of her sour mood by the sound of rapturous applause. She can scarcely believe it—her head turns to track the source, barely understanding where it’s coming from—

Each and every ghost in the room is giving her and Jack a standing ovation. Some of them are crying through their smiles, eyes alight with hope and joy as they clap—

Next to her, Alice looks startled by their outburst.

“Maddie,” she says softly, “you know I love you, but I don’t know if this was one of the reactions I was—”

“—you mentioned you had a prototype?” Walker cuts her off excitedly. Excitedly! Maddie looks over at him wearily. In all the time she’s known him, he’s never been anything other than a brooding, serious being with a chip on his shoulder—and now, he’s smiling, eyes open wide and filled with emotion the likes of which she can’t describe.

“Yes, but—”

“We need to try it immediately,” Skulker says, standing and rounding the table, barely waiting for Maddie and Jack to stand to lead them to the portion of the lab it’s being kept in. The ghosts follow hot on their heels, so enthused Maddie’s nearly dizzy with confusion.

She had presented it because they needed something to present. The ghosts were beyond restless, and they needed to see the humans were still trying to save them. She had nearly no faith in the theory, so why did they think it would work? After weeks and weeks of bitter, heated debate, of being shot down, of sneers and snide remarks and barely civil discourse—they suddenly believed in her work, no questions asked?

They get to the prototype and the ghosts crowd around it immediately.

“You did the calculations?” Kitty asks.

“Yes, but—”

“And you think it could work, that it could fix our home?” Ember asks.

“We do, yes, but—”

“We need to hurry, before it gets any worse!” the Ghost Writer declares. 

“Can you launch it now?” the princess wonders.

“Can you all calm down—”

A heavy clang comes from the corner of the room, so massive it shakes the floor they stand on. Maddie puts out a hand to make sure the prototype doesn’t dislodge and shatter (with their hopes alongside it), but it doesn’t so much as budge. The ghosts withdraw almost immediately, suddenly subdued.

They spread out, and Maddie is momentarily confused—until the knight steps forward, abandoning his post for the first time since he’d taken it up.

“Silence while the Mother speaks,” he says, deep voice rumbling around the room. He receives what he demands.

“Don’t call me that,” Maddie snaps. “I have a doctorate. I’m not just a mother, or some random woman off the street. This nickname nonsense has gone on long enough.”

She expects that he’ll ignore her, but the knight surprises her. He bows low and says, “my most sincere apologies, your grace. I shall not forget.”

Your grace? She doesn’t know if he’s mocking her or not, and before she decides one way or another, he rises.

“My watch here has ended,” he addresses the room. “My King bades me home. I leave the end of an era to you.”

With those words, he turns on his heel and throws his enormous sword over his shoulder. The portal is already open for him (it hasn’t closed since the ghosts arrived, in fact) and without further ado, he steps through, vanishing from sight.

Everyone in the room, ghost and human alike, stares at the portal. Maddie does too, unsure of how she feels, suddenly seeing it without the knight nearby. It feels empty all of a sudden. She knows she should feel relieved, but the knight’s disappearance…well, it can only be a good thing, right? Proof that they believe the prototype will work?

Jack gently elbows her arm.

“You ready, your grace?” he says with a grin, a new little in-joke between them blooming in the unsteady quiet of their lab.

“I’m ready if you are, your grace,” she says, a smile fighting its way to the surface. She can't help but add, “but Jack, if it doesn’t work—”

“It’ll work,” Jack says softly to her. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll find something that will. We always do.”

Her husband’s words soothe like nothing else, and Maddie can’t help but believe him.

“It’ll work,” she says. “Well, then: let’s do it!”

Maddie has to wonder nearly a week later, in the middle of her furious repairs of the Specter Speeder: did it matter what happened once they ran through their safety checks and declared their prototype ready to launch?

(“Everyone, stand back,” Maddie commands, and the room obeys. “It’s live.”

“If anything goes wrong, we’ll be the first to know it!” Jack says, and the implication that everyone in the room would be obliterated if the prototype went off early sails over a crowd of enthusiastic heads.)

As she barks orders at her husband, who leaps to follow them: did it matter that it flew exactly where they wanted it to fly?

(Maddie watches with bated breath as the camera on the prototype shows it moving to the target site with pinpoint accuracy. The ghosts watch the screen with her, chattering amongst themselves in a language she can’t understand.

“It’ll work,” she prays.

“It’ll work,” Jack repeats.)

As she in her restless work forgets to check something so essential to her success that when it comes back to bite her, all she can do is scream with searing rage and a broken heart: did it matter that it exploded as planned?

(“Detonation in ten…” Maddie starts, and Jack’s hand hovers over the button that will set the prototype off. “Nine…”

The room joins in. Even the peers that so doubted their work are excited now, swept up in the ghost’s adamance that this was the answer they had been looking for. Maddie remembers to close the portal in case the blast reaches them.

“Eight!”

The Ghost Writer yells, barely looking up from the book he’s scribbling into at breakneck speed. Maddie wonders what he writes; she’s never asked.

“Seven!”

Walker’s voice has never sounded so light. The camera detaches from the prototype and watches from a safe distance as it sails towards its target.

“Six!”

As Ember counts, she nearly sings, and her hair blazes high above her.

“Five!”

Kitty is nearly jumping up and down bumping excitedly into ghost and human alike in her joy.

“Four!”

Dorathea, who cries silently next to Kitty, but her eyes aren’t on the screen at all, they’re on a Fenton Thermos in the corner of the room, and Maddie doesn’t remember leaving one of the old ones there, but maybe Jack—

“Three!”

Technus is louder than ever, vibrating so much he has to hold his glasses in place as he goes for fear of them slipping off.

“Two!”

Spectra looks younger than Maddie’s ever seen her.

“One!”

Skulker’s smile looks relieved.

“Zero!”

Jack presses the button, and the screen goes completely white.)

As she cuts her hands on the component parts and ignores pleas to slow down, for her own health: did it matter that the ghosts cheered and banged their hands on the metal table until it dented in on itself?

(When the light dies down, the first thing Maddie thinks is that nothing looks different.

The ghosts don’t seem to agree. 

They explode, they nearly riot as the light dies down.

“We did it!”

“We’re saved!”

Someone, she can’t tell who, hits the portal button, and one by one, the ghosts fly into the ghost zone, taking with them a clear explanation of what they were celebrating.

Maddie manages to snag Walker’s sleeve before he steps forward and yanks him back.

“Nothing happened!” she hisses. “It didn’t work; nothing changed!”

Gently, he grabs her hand and pulls it away from his arm. Instead of dropping it, he cups it in his own, and brings it to his mouth, leaving a chaste kiss on her knuckles. 

“My lady,” he says as she yanks her hand away. “Check your machines if you don’t believe us. Our home is saved, and our terms have ended. Consider us allies or enemies at your leisure. I hope your future hunts are as fruitful as ours was.”

He pulls away without another word and disappears last into the portal. Without another soul touching it, the portal closes behind him, leaving the humans behind to stare at each other with incredulity.)

As over and over, for reasons she can’t understand, the portal she made refuses to open, no matter what she does, deaf to her wordless, furious, screaming: did it even matter, that they saved the world?

“It worked,” Rivera says, disbelief clear on their face. “All of my tests are coming back normal.”

“Ours too,” the Campbells say in unison.

“It…it must have,” Alice agrees, looking up from her own results. “There’s no signs of destabilization anywhere, anymore.”

Maddie looks over everything in triplicate. She runs experiments. She analyzes samples. She studies and pokes and prods and does everything she can think of to confirm the results.

“It worked,” she finally declares. A great weight heaves itself off her chest, and she feels almost giddy. “We saved the ghost zone.”

“And Earth!” Jack reminds them. “If only someone else besides us knew it!”

There’s a beat of silence.

Then, peals of laughter, as the trials and worries of the last few weeks finally slough off and disappear from existence. 

“Hell, I’ll write a paper no one will publish about it!” Rivera exclaims.

“I’ll present it at a conference no one will attend!” Cassandra chortles. 

“I bet I could get a grant denied in record time to study it further!” Maddie says.

“We’re going to change a field no one pays any attention to,” Thomas laughs. “It’ll quadruple in size. There’s going to be dozens of us soon!”

“Reach for the moon, Tom!” Jack says. “There’s gonna be fifty of us, some day!”

“Hey!” Alice says. The other five stop laughing at the sharp tone in her voice. She glares at them for a moment before she cracks. “Do you think this’ll be what gets ectobiology into a second dictionary?”

The six lose their minds laughing.

“You mean besides Ripley’s?” Rivera cackles. “I hope so!”

“We’ve gotta do something!” Thomas declares. “First round’s on us if you know a place, Jack and Maddie!”

Jack and Maddie do know a place. They introduce it to their peers, who after weeks of what felt like fruitless work, are very pleased to meet it.

“Jack!” Maddie yells in a haze. “Jack!”

His head shoots up from where he stands in the crowd and when he meets her eyes, an easy smile pulls at his lips.

“Maddie!” he cries, and pulls her into a hug when he gets to her.

“Jack!” she says, matching his smile. “I was wondering…”

“Yeah? About what?”

He’s light on his feet and happier than she’s seen him in months, and while she doesn’t want to ruin the mood, the question’s been on her mind for the last few hours, tentative yet ever present and demanding greater attention as the night goes on.

“Did anyone take any readings on the ghost zone before we sent the prototype through?” she asks. “I don’t remember comparing the final readings to anything recent…”

The question peters out, but Jack frowns, brow furling as he thinks.

“I don’t think so,” he finally says. “I don’t think we saw a point, at the time.”

He shrugs. 

“No use crying over spilled milk, Mads!” he decides. “It worked, and that’s what’s important. We can finally go back to doing what we do best!”

He pulls her back onto the dance floor with him, and by the end of the song, Maddie’s only focused on the husband at her side, who even after all these years, manages to pull her out of her mood in record time.

The scientists and the place have been getting to know each other for hours now, and at the end of a long night, they part on amicable terms.

They perhaps leave drunker than they’ve ever been in their lives, but Maddie doesn’t care, because the world is saved, and more importantly, her family is, too.

The next evening, long after hangovers have passed, the scientists begin to clear out. Jack and Maddie help where they can, but by the time they finally get out of bed, the work is mostly done.

“You can stay the night if you need to,” Maddie tells everyone, and is graciously turned down.

“My partner’s expecting me,” Rivera says with a grin. “Can’t keep them waiting any longer.”

“And we’re going on vacation!” Cassandra declares. “Our flight actually takes off in a few hours; we’ve got to go now or we’ll miss it! Thanks for everything, Maddie, Jack!”

“I’m off tonight, too,” Alice says as the Campbells rush out the door. “Summer B is gonna be here before I know it, and I’m lecturing four days a week.”

Rivera shouts their thanks and follows behind them a few minutes later. By the time Alice is out the door and they have the house in some kind of semi-clean state, Maddie looks at the clock and sees it’s already ten at night.

“Y’know Maddie,” Jack says, once the house is quiet and clean and theirs for the first time in weeks, “as we sent that thing flying off, I was running the calculations again…and honestly, I can’t believe it worked!”

Maddie lets out a sigh of relief. “We’ll leave it at ‘it worked’ for now. The ghosts must have seen something in it that we missed…I can’t imagine they’d get so worked up about it for no reason.”

Jack shrugs. “There’s a lot about them we still don’t get, but I can't wait to learn what makes them tick. At least we can get the kids home now!”

Maddie agrees wholeheartedly. She sends Jazz and Danny a quick text telling them to come home the next morning. Jazz responds a few minutes later with a thumbs up. The last time Maddie checks her phone that night, Danny hasn’t seen the message, but she assumes he’s asleep and will see it the next day.

She breathes a sigh of relief. Finally, their lives are going back to normal. She promised herself that they’d go spend some time as a family after everything, and it looks like everything’s come and gone. She makes a mental note, as she’s drifting off, to start planning as soon as she gets a moment to breathe. 

Danny gets home early the next day—the door slams, and it wakes Maddie up with the urge to greet her youngest. She must be getting slower though, because by the time she gets up to check on him, she sees that his door is closed and the light in his room is off—he must have had a late night, and she decides to let him rest.

She walks down the hall and is about to knock on Jazz’s door when she hears the shower running. She hadn’t heard Jazz come in, but Jazz never lets the door slam unless she’s upset, and now that the ghosts are gone, she doesn’t have anything to be upset over. Satisfied that her kids are home safe, Maddie brews herself a cup of coffee and heads down to the lab.

Jack comes down about an hour later to tell her that he’s going to run some errands with Jazz. 

“She’s been awfully quiet today,” Jack says. “Barely said anything earlier when I said ‘good morning’. I think we need some father-daughter time, y’know? Get us back on track. Maybe you can take Danny out later.”

“Good idea, honey,” she says. “Maybe we’ll go out to lunch when he wakes up.”

They’ll be back in time for dinner. Maddie sends her love up with him and gets back to the ghostscript book she’d been half-neglecting since the whole ghost-host affair began. She’s ready for things to finally go back to normal, and for her family to finally be together again. She buries herself in her studying, eager to absorb enough to have another reading session with Danny as soon as she had something new to teach him.

And then, a six eyed crow lands on the lab table, and Maddie is so shocked she nearly jumps out of her seat. She checks for a gun at her side, but doesn’t pull it out. Weeks of interacting with ghosts has numbed some of the jittery fear of them out of her, and this ghost in particular is more of a nuisance than a threat. 

“Glorious celebrations are upon us, Mother!” the bird says, staring straight at her. “Our king’s court is victorious at last! Our kingdom is safe! Your blessing has been well-received by the court!”

“I never sent anything to the king,” Maddie says carefully. “Why does his court think they have my blessing?”

The crow says, hopping excitedly in place, “you sent your blessing to the Ghost King’s court, of course, Mother!”

Maddie decides it’s not worth the argument. If they think she sent them off with flowery words or her respect, let them. They know full well that the moment they start trouble her “blessing” won’t be enough to save them.

There is one thing she can’t quite leave alone, though.

“You’ve called me that before,” Maddie says. “Mother. A few of you did, or you picked some other stupid nickname and kept using it, even when I told you to stop. I got some of them pretty easily—no one’s ever explained why you decided to call me mother, though.”

The ghost bird ruffles up in self-importance.

“Duchess of the Southern Quarter,” the crow caws. “Life and Death Giver to our Holy Sword. Steadfast Watcher, Venerated Warrior, Huntress of Amity Park. Guardian Over the Second Gate of Promise. Lady of Unending Life and Mother of all Ghosts. We call you by one of your many names, a title of respect for one such as yourself, who has done so much for us!”

Maddie lets out an uneasy laugh, stomach souring as the words pour over her. She hates titles. She never really saw the point in the respect royalty seemed to demand, like they were entitled to it without an ounce of work put towards earning it, after all.

“I haven’t done anything for you,” she growls. “I don’t even think I even figured out how to fix the ghost zone, if we’re being honest. You’ve mixed me up with someone else.”

“Surely not!” the crow says. “You sent your blessing! Can I bring a message back for the king, your grace?”

“Stop it,” Maddie snaps. “I’m not a ghost. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t have anything to say to any of you. Get out of here, before I change my mind and put you in a pie!”

For the first time, the bird’s head tilts, and it looks up at her, confused. Rage, hot and potent, suddenly comes to life in her heart. She’s sick of ghosts not listening. She’s sick of trying to make them understand, trying to work with them, trying to be nice. It’s always been easier to shoot first. Until now, she didn’t think it was better, too, but this is what it’s come to.

“I haven’t given any blessings away. I’m not your mother, so don’t bother trying to convince me I’m wrong,” she insists harshly, voice raising as she goes. “Get out of here!”

The crow hesitates before it asks her, “should we still expect you at the coronation? Will you join the court, as is your right? I have an invitation, if you would like to recei—”

“No!” Maddie snaps. “No to all of it! Don’t throw up on my book again! Get out of here, now, or I’ll make you leave. And don’t come back!”

Before she can go for her gun, the crow hops backward and bows.

“Mother,” the crow says cheerfully, taking flight and circling above her head, “your sacrifice will never be forgotten. As you request it, so it shall be, but know that we leave you with our eternal thanks. Prosper and die well, as the court of the King of all Ghosts prays for it, and as the King your son wills for it to be!”

Her heart nearly leaps out of her chest.

“The King my what?” she bellows, all restraint broken as the impossible words land home. 

The crow breaks from its looping path and flies like a bullet into the portal.

Maddie pulls her gun and shoots—just a second too late. The crow disappears into murky green depths.

She stares at the glowing green miasma of the portal for a moment, fear pooling in her gut. She closes it and sets up every security measure she programmed to keep it shut.

She’s got her phone in her hand a second later and immediately calls her son. He was home, though. She doesn't know why her heart rate's spiked so drastically. She heard him come in. His door was closed and his lights were out. He was asleep in her house. The ghost bird was confused, or it was evil and trying to trick her...

…but it dawns on her: she had heard the door slam. And Jazz had been quiet today, so quiet Jack had noticed something was wrong, and Jazz doesn’t slam the door unless she’s—

Maddie sprints up the stairs and bursts into her home as her phone rings. After so many weeks of constantly twisting around machinery and minding each piece of equipment laid out, her clean kitchen looks sterile before her eyes as she looks upon it in the light for the first time in days. 

Almost immediately, she hears a repetitive buzz from underneath a large stack of mail she and Jack hadn’t sorted through yet. Unease coursing through her, she thinks it must be Jack's phone that’s ringing at the table, or else one of the others forgot theirs in their rush to leave, and she lifts the papers—

Maddie sees Danny’s cell phone sitting on the table.

Maddie snatches it up. As she jostles it, she sees Danny’s missed quite a few calls from Tucker and Sam—and as her phone goes to voicemail, one from her, as well. The phone is password protected, and she can only read the first line of text from each of his friends: Danny, don’t do this— and dude, you can’t actually — are the only things she can read.

“Danny!” she calls out in a panic. “DANNY!”

There is absolutely no response. Her boy is just asleep, though. He can’t hear her, and he forgot his phone downstairs, and he’s asleep in his room, because why would she believe anything a ghost had to say about—

“DANNY!”

She bolts to the stairs, speeding up them two at a time.

Maddie bursts into his empty, silent room and turns on the light. It’s tidy in a way she’s never seen it before; her son is messy and his room at its best still has laundry on the floor and piles of his things on every flat surface he owns. As she looks upon well stacked shelves and perfectly ordered surfaces, dread the likes of which she's never felt floods through her.

Her eyes almost unwillingly fall at last to the perfect bed: against his least favorite pillow, atop a guest comforter, rests a letter. When she picks it up, she sees it’s sealed with wax pressed with a signet ring: the emblem of the Ghost King is easily recognizable, but when she turns it around, Danny’s messy scrawl is even more familiar.

Sorry, is all that’s written on the front.

“Danny,” Maddie hears herself say, but can’t feel her lips moving when she speaks. She doesn’t hear what comes out next, if anything comes at all.

She remembers: “Mom, I don’t think I can be here anymore,” Danny says, voice croaky, and there’s no mistaking the fact that he’d been crying.  

And she remembers: “The only letter I’ll ever send,” he says solemnly. 

With shaking hands, Maddie desperately pries the envelope open.

She is unmade by the contents within.